Product Manager, Carbon Design System

The Carbon Design System is IBM’s open-source design system for digital products and experiences. Rooted in the foundations of the IBM Design Language Carbon provides working code platform assets design kits patterns guidelines and tooling—all sustained by an active community of contributors.

Carbon exists to help internal product teams move faster reduce rework and build consistent accessible and elegant user experiences. By delivering universal reusable assets Carbon frees teams from reinventing foundational elements and allows them to focus on their product’s highest-value user needs.

Carbon Design System is seeking a Product Manager to lead our Core library — the shared common infrastructure that powers IBM’s ecosystem of components patterns and tooling. This role requires a platform-oriented product mindset strong systems thinking and the ability to synthesize needs across many teams with competing priorities.

As a PM in this space you will:

• Own the backlog for the core primitives libraries styles and cross-cutting capabilities that nearly every Carbon asset depends on

• Balance multiple streams of work context-switching between design engineering accessibility governance adoption support and stakeholder requests

• Evaluate input from many product teams with diverse use cases and distill requirements into universal capabilities that scale

• Make decisions that optimize for long-term ecosystem health—prioritizing reusability maintainability performance and design integrity over one-off solutions

This is a highly collaborative role that interfaces with designers engineers maintainers adoption partners platform architecture and product teams building on Carbon. Success requires listening deeply navigating ambiguity and guiding trade-offs that preserve the system’s coherence while unblocking teams at scale.

• Lead backlog prioritization story development and sizing for Carbon’s Core Libraries and foundational capabilities

• Run agile ceremonies in partnership with engineering including grooming sizing sessions and iteration planning

• Work across multiple concurrent initiatives while context-switching fluidly between stakeholders disciplines and levels of abstraction

• Engage with product teams to understand patterns in needs extract reusable requirements and steward contributions back into the system

• Collaborate closely with design and engineering to ensure components and patterns meet accessibility performance and UX standards

• Define and measure success criteria for core libraries including adoption usage telemetry and quality metrics

• Advocate for consistency design language fidelity accessibility and long-term lifecycle health of Carbon’s assets

• Communicate clearly and confidently to technical and non-technical audiences ensuring shared understanding of priorities and roadmap

• 3–5 years as a product manager owning delivery of a product platform or application

• Experience managing roadmaps prioritization frameworks KPIs and business justification for product decisions

• Hands-on experience operating within agile and scrum processes:

  • Backlog refinement

  • Grooming and sizing

  • Iteration planning

  • Continuous delivery and feedback loops

• Demonstrated ability to operate in multi-stakeholder environments with shifting priorities

• Proven systems thinking with an ability to reason about interdependencies lifecycle impacts and ecosystem-level design

• Strong written and verbal communication skills with comfort presenting to executives engineers and designers

• Experience with design systems platform products or shared libraries

• Experience participating in release cycles that impact large user bases ideally at enterprise scale

• Ability to anticipate downstream impact of design system decisions on designers developers adopters and integrators

• Background developing standards frameworks or platform capabilities adopted across multiple products

• Skilled at communicating migration paths version shifts deprecations and breaking changes to large multi-disciplinary audiences

• Experience building business cases or evaluating competitive systems

• Familiarity with open-source principles or contributor ecosystems